The collision of Aboriginal civilization with European civilization was one of inconceivable brutality: microbial shock, more or less coordinated policies of extermination, military invasions and the government authorities’ wilful neglect.

However, the difficulties northeastern America’s indigenous peoples had in appropriating what we have come to call the modern world did not come only from the violence of weapons or epidemics. They were also broken?despite heroic efforts to resist?on the field cultivation, meant here in its broadest sense, as well as by the desire to drag them into the “powerful universe of the modern economic order.”

When, in the name of progress and civilization, ancestral Aboriginal culture was subverted and an entire social system was shattered, the Aboriginal’s relationship to the world was forever altered. Aboriginals could not understand why working the fields should be more liberating than hunting, why farming by men should be more indispensable than that done by women, why a sedentary life should be more exhilarating than a nomadic one, why submission to a chief should be easier to bear than the equality of the tribe’s members. Such a program could not satisfy all those who, in the early days of America’s colonization, compared what Europe had to offer with what they already had, and chose to preserve their way of life. It took four centuries of gifts, threats, promises, hardships and misery for the northern continent’s indigenous peoples to finally embrace, gradually and to varying degrees, Western modernity.

This essay focuses on the analysis of this cultural tsunami. It goes beyond a simple chronology of events and an ethnography of cultural facts to establish a political anthropology that repositions the peoples’ future within the larger framework of a history of “regimes of domination.”